Blog Day

Today is blog day.. so here are the new blogs i've discovered and would like to recommend

Girish is my classmate at Wimwi and is an amazingly talented musician, photgrapher, sleeper in class.

Another new blog that i like is Oka's take on life at WimWi. Entertaining :)

Haven't discovered any other blogs recently, hope blog day corrects that!

Overheard..

We've had a very long and complicated case this week in Manac that's left almost the entire class feeling like we've been hit by a truck. We stumble out of the class dazed by Accounting Standards and Deferred Tax liabilites.

Everything seems to make sense for one magic moment. And then, the moment is gone.

See, Manac is like an onion. You keep peeling it layer by layer. Of course at the end, you'll be left with nothing but a lot of tears.

- Management Accounting professor

The Funniest thing i've read in ages..

No.. seriously..

I have some reservations about this one

I don't understand why the Women's bill is being passed. I don't understand why women are pleased about it.

Should we have more women politicians? Why not..

But are reservations the way to go to achieve that? I don't think so. What do you think will happen now? Instead of Laloo we'll have Rabri. What will this achieve? Increased sensitivity towards women in the parliament? Fat chance!

We'll have a bunch of figurehead women with men behind them making the decisions. The fact that we have so few women in politics, business or any other field is not a problem in itself. It is simply a symptom of deeper malaises.

Our social conditioning still limits women from getting involved in politics. You have the rare Brinda Karat or Sheila Dixit. But they are few and far between. At the grass roots level there are few women getting involved in politics. That is a loss to society because women generally tend to seek solutions rather than seeking to expand their power. (this is a general sweeping assumption based largely on Gilligan's arguments against Kohlberg's research - ethics of care etc)

Coming back to the stop gap solution proposed by the govt, i think it is a short sighted move that won't really help anyone at all.

Was having a conversation with a batchmate yesterday about how few women there are on campus. He observed that when he wrote CAT, atleast 40% of the people in the exam center were female. Yet only 40 out of 300 people here are female. What happened?

I refuse intuitively to believe that women are lacking in intellect in any way. I think somehow, through some mechanism of social conditioning, women are gently weaned away from considering further education beyond the age of 21-23.

Take your average 23 yr old girl who has just finished CA. If she's contemplating writing CAT, nine times out of ten her parents will start worrying about when she will ever get married. I've had people who asked my dad "How are you letting her study an MBA.. where will you go for a more qualified husband for her now"..

We face the same inherent biases everywhere we go, even amongst the really polite gentlemen on campus who observe innocently that "you seem more suited for soft stuff like HR.." People who know me would be amazed if i were called anything close to "soft"!! :)

I think it stems from the society we're in and the opportunities we're offered. Those changes will take a while to happen. Long journeys lie ahead. And reservations won't help..

Journeys

I want to take a picture today. And try to remember how perfect this one moment is. Two am. With Ilaiyaraja playing in the background. I’ve got hot water for a sore throat, chocolate, purple post its and a few hours of work left.

And a weeks worth of washing hanging in my room lending it the unique smell of surf excel. (Now you know it’s a good day, when rhyming goes my way).

Life is a learning process. Here you learn to test the limits of what you can do. Balancing your life is rather more difficult that balancing a line. Figuring out priorities and keeping track of it all. Ensuring you don’t lose yourself in passing waves.

Each of us here is on a different journey. An intensely personal and different one..

Three books a month. I need to read to keep myself sane. Talk to mom and dad once a day. Need to keep in touch with what is happening back home. One foot back home in Mylapore and another here on campus…

Everyone around me needs to get a foreign job. Staying up until 4 30 am, 5 30 am... by the time the term ends I’m up until 6 30 in the morning studying. Networking.

Making friends who will last a lifetime. Sipping chai at LKP till 4 am listening to stories and trading secrets by candlelight.

Dorm pizza dinners. Impromptu gathering of people who hate the mess food, ordering pizzas and sitting and watching friends. Promising not to cry at the end of season 10.

Staying awake at 2 am. Sleepy, tired but typing furiously in front of a fluorescent monitor. Promising not to lose touch with one of the few connects left with a past world. Blogging, writing long emails. Chatting on msn. Talking talking talking to keep myself sane.

Three submissions and exams from Monday. Fighting against time, deadlines and sleep to put up a play. Sleeping between acts during rehearsals. Reading HR case mat on stage when I don’t have lines to say. Giving up on fear and sleep and doing things I’ve never done before. Watching people go through thirty cigarettes over three days, to keep one awake.. to keep one buzzing.. For the sound of an audience standing up to applaud.

Four am coffee breaks with an entire exhausted class that has worked all night to create something close to magic. Posters, props, a small car and a very large sunglass made from thermocol. An Uma Thurman fashioned out of 6 meters of yellow cloth and a large shiny plastic knife.

Finishing HP6 on the very first day it released. Watching three movies a week. Every episode of Joey so far. Scrubs, Wonder years. Listening to classical Sudha Raghunath at 4 am and missing my mom so badly. Fighting over the last piece of murruku in a box. Missing home and everything about it.

Pictures up on walls. Struggling against strange schedules to stay together. Ticking off weekends. Ten Nine Eight... I’ll be home in Three. Escalating cell phone bills, arguments over who promised to call and who didn’t, birthdays spent away... and I miss you.

Dorm jijus who visit once a term... and take us all out for ice cream. This year, we have a dorm niece too. Who’s two. On a journey to make my child’s life better.

To be able to afford things I couldn’t earlier. To break out of a system. To go beyond coding. To get away from something. If I weren’t in IIMA I’d be married by now… overheard in a guys dorm.

On a journey to build cv points. Insight, Conflu, Chaos, CCC and Messcomm. To distill myself down to one page of bullet points and hope it exceeds expectations.

On a journey to score! Hand up in every class, trying to catch the Profs eye. To add value to a class discussion. To make my point. To do well... or simply, to survive and stay awake... even more so in a class where there are no points for the same.

On individual, diverse journeys. To make friends, meet someone, get a job, get a life, get somewhere, leave somewhere, be someone, or simply to be..

Lights Camera Action..

We put up "Kamala" over the past two days. I play one of the smaller parts in the play. One long dialogue and a few short ones. But rehearsing for the play and putting it up has been amazing fun. Our tuchchas (seniors) juggled three paper submissions and end terms which start tomorrow, while we made it through four continuous days of tests and rehearsals and v little sleep.. All in all, an amazing time.

I guess, to a certain extent i'm proud of doing something that is SO outside my comfort zone. I've never gone on stage before and yet this past one week, i've danced, acted and had a blast!

Voices..

Jaisingh Jadhav : As journalists, it is our responsibility to bring these atrocities to light.. the abuses, the massacre.. We need to educate the suffering masses and awaken their consciousness.

Kakasaheb : And you plan to do all of this.. by writing.. in English? Sensational journalism? vandhya sambhog..!

Jain : Where will i go now saale, for the next big scoop?

Kamala : Yes master.. Of course master.. I've been bought.. bought by that gentleman.. Yes Master.. No master..

Sarita : In this day an age, a man keeps a slave in central Delhi.. Hear the story of the slave kamala, who was bought for less than the price of a buffalo. Hear the story of the other slave, who was given away for free.

If you're in Amdavad this weekend.. come hear our voices..

a simple song evokes memories..

kanda naal mudhalai, kadhal perugudhadi

of rustling silk saris.
in the cool winter air..
..hangs the smell of jasmine, hot samosas and filter coffee.
fighting for parking space outside a crowded sabha.
chatting up old friends.
december season..
..in chennai

missing home

Sleaze!

Slimes of India does it again. They've taken a childrens story book and converted it into cheap trash.

I read the article, and wondered what the point was. This is a kind of journalism where you first decide on an angle (archies/harry are BAD) and then look for facts. Failing to find them, you twist existing ones to suit your story. Ranjan Yumnam, are you happy that your name is in print? Will you frame this story in your study? Show it to your dad's friends? As an example of investigative journalism?

If i take any passage from the bible, or from a seventh standard maths textbook, i can twist it into sleaze. The point is, was there hidden innuendo? In this case, it is extremely clear that it wasn't. Even out of context, the words sound like subtitles to v. bad vernacular porn. So what then, is the author trying to say? I'm still wondering.

In the sixth standard, boys in our class were on the threshold of puberty. They'd crack silly jokes where the punch line would be a private part. It got so, that we couldn't solve physics problems on momentum without the class going into hysterics. (Think, two balls colliding at speed x).

I'll say now what my physics teacher said then : "Boys, Grow up!"